The thing is - it is rarely identical. Let's say you run Ubuntu LTS both on your local machine and your servers. Chances are there will be the occasional build

The thing is - it is rarely identical. Let's say you run Ubuntu LTS both on your local machine and your servers. Chances are there will be the occasional build dependency, library, conf setting that you have installed/configured locally but not on your servers. Or you did install in both places but forgot about it. A new team member comes and "it works on your machine but it doesn't work on his/her". I don't think identical setup on local and remote machines is the solution. Something like Vagrant + a provisioner (Ansible, Chef Solo, just a bash script) is miles better in my experience. And is not host OS dependent, you can run your dev VM on Mac or Windows too. I agree about the package manager. Using a workstation without a proper package manager is a bit annoying once you get used to pacman/apt/yum.